Refer Report
Kenta Izumi, representative of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan. Kyodo Yonhap News
Japan’s main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party is still struggling to overcome the shortage of candidates even on the 3rd, four days before the announcement of the next representative election.
Ahead of the announcement of the party leader election on the 7th, only two people from the Constitutional Democratic Party have officially declared their candidacy: former party leader Yukio Edano and former Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. This is a small number compared to the seven groups within the party who attended the party leader election pre-election briefing session. Current party leader Kenta Izumi, who has expressed his intention to run several times, has not yet officially declared his candidacy.
The Asahi Shimbun analyzed the background of the fact that the race for the Constitutional Democratic Party’s leadership has not been decided until today. The two key factors are the Constitutional Democratic Party’s regulation requiring more than 20 members of the National Assembly to recommend candidates for the leadership election, and the faction within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party that is less cohesive.
According to reports, the opposition Democratic Party of Korea has difficulty giving government positions to its members and does not have a structure for differential distribution of political funds, so there is not much loyalty to the group’s representative figure. There is no separate group office within the party and it can belong to multiple groups.
Asahi reported an anecdote about former acting leader Kenji Eda recently having a training camp with some members of his 20-member party group in Tochigi Prefecture. The group-level training camp was interpreted as a means of gathering support, but one of the participants did not confirm whether they would support him, saying, “We just studied together.”
Representative Izumi is also said to be having a hard time gathering 20 candidate recommendations right now. According to local media, at least three people, including Representative Izumi, former acting representative Eda, and House of Representatives member Harumi Yoshida, are working to secure candidate recommendations. However, as Edano and Noda have already secured candidate recommendations, it is expected that it will be realistically difficult for all three candidates to actually run, and each candidate is watching trends, analyzing the movements of other groups and scenarios in which other candidates give up their candidacy, public broadcaster NHK reported.
According to the Mainichi Shimbun, on the previous day, the 2nd, the members of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Korea proposed to Izumi to revise the party regulation of “20 recommenders.” Considering the current state of the party with 136 members, they argued that it was “too high a hurdle.” They proposed to relax the number of recommenders to “10% of the members of the National Assembly or 20 people,” and to expand the qualifications of recommenders to include local assembly members and branch heads.
However, some say that the difficulties Representative Izumi is experiencing are due to demands for reform within the party. Representative Izumi, as well as the two people who have officially declared their candidacy for representative, are both former representatives. Asahi reported that even within the party group led by Representative Izumi, there are comments that “it will be difficult for him to run in the House of Representatives election with his old face.”
Source: Korean